Bernard Headley, ContributorTHE PEOPLE of the Caribbean will be confronting a myriad of new complex social problems as we move further into the post-industrial age. The resolution of these problems will require mature relationships between nations.
In hardly any other period in our history have we been more challenged to develop informed understandings of multifaceted problems than we now do. And it's precisely that informed, intelligent understanding that will more and more be the prerequisite for cooperatively working through, if not always ultimately resolving, thorny issues with particularly powerful nations to the North.
We won't get far at solving issues of bilateral significance by obfuscating the issues or parlaying misinformation about them. We are even less likely to move forward when, on such matters, actors in the public sphere incessantly play to the gallery.
FORCED REPATRIATION
The forced repatriation of marginalised persons back to their marginalised origins is one of those post-industrial problems that will be around for many more years and generations to come. Forced return of large numbers of foreigners residing within national borders happens in Europe as it does in Africa.
In post-9/11 America, its people more wary than ever before of threats from "hateful outsiders", deportations and denials of entry will only increase, no matter whether it's George W. Bush or John Kerry in the White House. Right now, in New York, even minor offences like evading a subway fare can raise the prospect of deportation.
Developments of this sort are prompting researchers and serious policymakers to thoroughly examine the overall impact of deportations on families, on communities, on national life. Re-absorbing into communities large numbers of persons previously "unloaded" (or thought "gotten rid of") on others can present severe new challenges.
Dealing constructively with the challenges will require us getting past our angst and beyond ruling myths and convenient constructions. From a position of knowing all the facts, we can begin to treat wisely with the deporting countries, on both the causes and the repercussions of these involuntary reverse migrations.
The report on a study of Jamaican deportees from the United States that a team of researchers and I presented back on September 27, after months of painstaking data crunching, has sparked widespread controversy.
The controversy has resulted as much from, we now gather, after listening to chastening reactions from radio talk shows and Jamaica Government spokespersons, our findings going up against conventional wisdom, as well as from deep-seated wariness of 'the source'.
I want to dispense here with a few of the oft-repeated put-downs intended to blunt the hard findings of the study, and others seeking to challenge its validity. (Readers who want to examine the charts and tables we presented may do so by going to the University of the West Indies' website at www.mona.uwi.edu/spsw/
deportees.ppt).
QUESTIONABLE DATA
Data for the study, we said up front and throughout the presentation, came to the research team from the United States Government, via the U.S. Embassy in Kingston.
Certainly, as we teach our social science and journalism students, we need always to be mindful of the source (or sources) of your information. Data for one reason or another can be tainted, corrupted or compromised. Always check the reliability of your sources. Do they lie? Or, does the conveyor of the information have a reason to lie?
I do not believe that agencies of the United States Government have reasons to lie about things like the movement or ages of Jamaicans and other nationals visiting or taking up residence in their country.
Nor do countless demographers and World bodies, like the United Nations, which have consistently relied on a variety of U.S. Government sources for social, economic and environmental data; data they use to make colossal scientific projections and for human planning and intervention.
But, aha, insist the unconvinced, the deportee data you analysed came to you through the U.S Embassy here in Kingston. And, based on what we 'know' in recent months about the behaviour of local Embassy officials, notably their role in evicting from power Haitian President Aristide, and how they dealt with residents' concerns about the location of their new Embassy building, they cannot be trusted.
The behaviour of American Government representatives here (or elsewhere) is, of course, of critical importance. But how would the kind of behaviour mentioned removing Aristide and dissing upper St. Andrew residents affect collection and dissemination of immigration data?
Oh, conniving folks that Embassy officials here are, they could have fudged the data before handing them to you. And so it goes. At which point I can only say in exasperation, to anyone capable of manufacturing these elaborate conspiracy theories: If you fervently believe, with all your heart, that agencies of the United States Government have nothing better to do than spend their time concocting intricate disinformation schemes against the Jamaican people, then argument done. Disregard our study. It is for you totally invalid.
THE SPONSORSHIP
It was the Americans who paid for and sponsored your study. They had a position to defend. So, according to one talk-show host, the Americans got from me the results they desired, "what they bought and paid for". Some mean talk, isn't it? And from a woman who begins her show every morning praying, with the piety of St. Francis of Assisi, that the words of her mouth and the meditations of her heart will be "acceptable in thy sight, Oh Lord, my strength and my Redeemer." What this also does, though, is give remarkably clarifying insight into what some people tek God mek. Is her kind of venom spewed with equal apparent sadistic delight, I wonder, at all U.S. funded research endeavours?
Lots of us in the academy have competed for and have been successful at receiving significant funding from U.S. Government agencies, like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, often for research on devastating diseases, like HIV/AIDS and Sickle Cell anaemia, which devastatingly affect our region and people.
Others right here on the UWI campus have vied for grants from corporate American entities, like the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. And scores of our Jamaican students and young professionals compete every year for Hubert Humphrey and William Fulbright awards, offered through the U.S. Embassy.
As far as I know, no applicant, for either fellowship or research money, was ever asked to sign a loyalty oath or promise that his or her findings, or method of scholarship, would tow an official U.S. Government or party line.
THE POWERS THAT BE
Oh, it's not merely the sponsorship thing that is suspect, it's your cooperating, or appearing to cooperate, with an agency of the terrible right-wing U.S. Republican George W. Bush administration. That's the same crowd, remember, that manufactured and manipulated 'data' in order to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein. And still, don't forget, they removed Aristide.
Problem with that argument is, though: our trouble with the deportee millstone did not originate with the Bush or a Republican administration. Our liberal Democratic best friend, President Bill Clinton, signed into law, in 1996, the harsh immigration measures that have propelled waves of deportees coming back to our shores.
IGNORING THE 'BUBBA'
SMITH FACTOR
A point made by many is that, despite a small number of 'criminal' deportees being convicted for egregious crimes, they may, in resuming or continuing a life of crime in Jamaica, have a disproportionate effect on the crime and murder rates. It's a great point and, invariably, the prime example pointed to of one helluva deportee is Spanish Town's notorious, and late, 'Bubba' Smith, whose own awful ending triggered yet more killings.
But the course of Smith's existence supports one of our core findings: that our criminal deportees, particularly the more hardened, are homegrown; they were not 'bred' in America. Jamaican police rap sheet and U.S. immigration sources inform us that Smith had had numerous run-ins with Jamaican law enforcement well before his sojourn in America. He was a known entity to police in the Spanish Town vicinity where he maintained a residence and operated an extortion racket.
American immigration authorities say, "There is no evidence that Smith was ever granted a visa to enter the United States." Yet he was able to. He did so in January 1994 on a B-2 (tourist) visa. He entered at Texas' San Antonio Port Of Entry. He landed on American soil under the name Wayne Alexander Clark. The 'true Wayne Alexander Clark', U.S. immigration authorities disclosed, is someone identical in age to 'Bubba' Smith. He, Clark, had entered the United States years earlier through New York City and eventually became a U.S. citizen. Presumably Smith had found his way up from San Antonio to New York, where he had family, his mother lived in Brooklyn. At the time he left for America, Smith was on bail for a shooting-with-intent charge in Jamaica.
In the United States, he was convicted for drug-related crimes, for which immigration authorities eventually deported him. He was deported to Jamaica on May 22, 2002. Smith's Jamaican police rap sheet says he was deported, indeed, "in the name Wayne Alexander Clarke with date of birth June 29, 1964" 'Bubba' Smith's actual birth date, which would have placed Smith at 30 years old when he arrived in America for the known first time.
After spending eight years there (a portion of that time in prison), he was returned to Jamaica, at 38 years old. The data we analysed indicate that the average age at time of arrival into the United States for Jamaicans who would become 'criminal' deportees was 23 years old. They would spend, on average, between five and 11 years there (normally two-thirds of it in prison), before being deported. Their average age on return to Jamaica was 34 years old. 'Bubba' Smith fitted to a tee that demographic profile. He was very much a made-in-Jamaica, well-formed homeboy, the quintessential 'homey'. He had only gone to America to 'cool out', to escape the combined heat, and maybe hustle some dope while there. Neither the time he spent in America, nor him bearing the label 'deportee', was responsible for his formation.
Bernard Headley is Professor of Criminology at the University of the West Indies, Mona. Headley, Michael Gordon and Andrew MacIntosh, of the UWI's Department of Sociology, Psychology & Social Work, recently completed a study of Jamaicans deported from the United States. Please send your comments to infocus@gleanerjm.com
